There are innumerable applications which require the collection of data. For example, one particular area of interest is the creation of customised documents from document templates. A document template contains those parts of the document which are common to all documents generated from the templates. The template also comprises various portions of document content (such as text or images) whose inclusion in the final document depends on particular information. The final content of a completed document will therefore depend on certain pieces of relevant information which needs to be collected. For example, in a legal contract it is usually necessary to include a clause which specifies the law governing the contract and the particular wording of this clause will depend on the jurisdiction involved (such as ‘England and Wales’, ‘Scotland’ or ‘Japan’). It is therefore necessary to determine the relevant jurisdiction before a completed document can be generated. Once the jurisdiction is determined, the appropriate clause wording is inserted into the document template at the appropriate position to create a partially customised document. Once all further relevant information is known, a fully customised document can be generated by inserting all the necessary portions of document content.
Sometimes, certain information may be relevant and need to be collected in some cases but not relevant in other cases. For example, in the above example of a legal contract, where the jurisdiction is Japan, the document may be required to specify to which court (such as ‘Tokyo’ or ‘Kyoto’) legal proceedings should be brought. In this case, the completed document can only be generated if this further piece of information is known. However, if the jurisdiction is not Japan, then this information is not relevant and is not required to generate a completed document.
The collection of data is often performed using a questionnaire. For example, in an electronic document generation system a user may be prompted to answer various questions presented on a user interface by typing information into text boxes, by selecting buttons and so on. In some systems the questionnaire may be arranged so that those questions which are not relevant are indicated as such. For example, those questions that are not relevant may be ‘greyed out’ so that the user is unable to input any data for those questions. In the above example, where the user has indicated in a previous question that the jurisdiction is ‘England and Wales’ or ‘Scotland’ the question relating to the Japanese court is greyed out since this question is not relevant.
When data collection is required, it is often important to ensure that all relevant information has been properly collected. In the above example, it is important that all relevant information has been collected to ensure that the resulting legal contract is complete. If certain information was missing, this could render the contract invalid or ineffective. In cases where the relevance of a piece of information depends on other pieces of information it can be extremely difficult to determine whether all relevant information has been collected.
In the case of the generation of official documents such as legal documents, previously it has been necessary for an expert such as a lawyer to review the final document to ensure that the documents are complete and contain all the relevant information. However, this approach is expensive and time consuming. Also, if an expert is not available, it may not be possible to generate a final document with a high degree of certainty that the document contains all relevant information.
The present invention addresses the problems set out above.